Daniel Cazzulino has been writing about his work with XML Streaming Events which combines the ability to do XPath queries with the .NET Framework's forward-only, pull based XML parser. He shows the following code sample

// Setup the namespaces XmlNamespaceManager mgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(temp.NameTable); mgr.AddNamespace("r", RssBanditNamespace); // Precompile the strategy used to match the expression IMatchStrategy st = new RootedPathFactory().Create( "/r:feeds/r:feed/r:stories-recently-viewed/r:story", mgr); int count = 0; // Create the reader. XseReader xr = new XseReader( new XmlTextReader( inputStream ) ); // Add our handler, using the strategy compiled above. xr.AddHandler(st, delegate { count++; }); while (xr.Read()) { } Console.WriteLine("Stories viewed: {0}", count);

I have a couple of questions about his implementation the main one being how it deals with XPath queries such as /r:feeds/r:feed[count(r:stories-recently-viewed)>10]/r:title which can't be done in a forward only manner?

Oleg Tkachenko also pipes in with some opinions about streaming XPath in his post Warriors of the Streaming XPath Order. He writes

I've been playing with such beasts, making all kinds of mistakes and finally I came up with a solution, which I think is good, but I didn't publish it yet. Why? Because I'm tired to publish spoilers :) It's based on "ForwardOnlyXPathNavigator" aka XPathNavigator over XmlReader, Dare is going to write about in MSDN XML Dev Center and I wait till that's published.

May be I'm mistaken, but anyway here is the idea - "ForwardOnlyXPathNavigator" is XPathNavigator implementation over XmlReader, which obviously supports forward-only XPath subset...

And after I played enough with and implemented that stuff I discovered BizTalk 2004 Beta classes contain much better implementation of the same functionality in such gems as XPathReader, XmlTranslatorStream, XmlValidatingStream and XPathMutatorStream. They're amazing classes that enable streaming XML processing in much rich way than trivial XmlReader stack does. I only wonder why they are not in System.Xml v2 ? Is there are any reasons why they are still hidden deeply inside BizTalk 2004 ? Probably I have to evangelize them a bit as I really like this idea.

Actually Oleg is closer and yet farther from the truth than he realizes. Although I wrote about a hypothetical ForwardOnlyXPathNavigator in my article entitled Can One Size Fit All? for XML Journal my planned article which should show up when the MSDN XML Developer Center launches in a month or so won't be using it. Instead it will be based on an XPathReader that is very similar to the one used in BizTalk 2004, in fact it was written by the same guy. The XPathReader works similarly to Daniel Cazzulino's XseReader but uses the XPath subset described in Arpan Desai's Introduction to Sequential XPath paper instead of adding proprietary extensions to XPath as Daniel's does.

When the article describing the XPathReader is done it will provide source and if there is interest I'll create a GotDotNet Workspace for the project although it is unlikely I nor the dev who originally wrote the code will have time to maintain it.